Just My Bones
by MarillaT'Pel
Summary: Just a short piece about the events before McCoy shows up in the movie.  No pairings.  I don't own.


**Just something I wrote up while I had too much time on my hands. Hope you all like it!**

Just My Bones

Dr. Leonard McCoy sat on a on a stool in some poor excuse for a bar somewhere in Iowa. He wasn't even sure where he was, and he didn't really care. He'd spent a good chunk of his remaining money on a cab getting as far away from home as it would take him. Now, he was using another to get slowly drunk on the local brew.

The battle was finally over. His now ex-wife had taken his house, his job, and, most importantly, full custody of their five-year-old daughter, Joanna. He knew he was partly to blame for his failure in court. He'd gotten drunk off his ass, gone over to the house in the early hours of the morning, and thrown a rock through the bedroom window, shouting every infidelity-related obscenity he could think of. He hadn't known that Joanna was in the house, let alone that very room. They had agreed to leave her with Jocelyn's mother during the series of legal brawls that had made up the last few weeks of his life, but they'd stopped by to pick up something she needed for school. Jocelyn, opportunist that she was, had seized hold of the incident and used it to drive him into the ground in the courtroom. It didn't matter to anyone in that courtroom that it was just an unfortunate coincidence that Joanna was in the house, or that he would never have done such a thing if he'd known she was there. It didn't matter that he had no prior history of violent behavior, or that the divorce was a result of the fact that Jocelyn had cheated on him with one of his co-workers, in that very bedroom. All they had to hear was that a sweet little girl was traumatized by one drunken mistake from her father and that automatically made him a bad parent.

Now he couldn't go near his home, or his child. He was here, trying to drink away the knowledge of the fact that he might never be able to speak to his daughter in person again. And knowing Jocelyn, she would make the whole thing out to be his fault, and Joanna would grow up hating him. The hospital where he worked had fired him due to the threat of the bad publicity it would bring them, their decision aided by a few calls from Jocelyn's family. Thank god he'd never been able to bring himself to tell her the truth about his father's death, or she'd surely have taken his license as well, and he'd probably be in thinking these thoughts in prison.

He snapped out of his thoughts as he heard the bartender's last call. He felt as if his body and mind had become completely independent of one another. He could feel himself just going through the motions as he picked up his jacket and the beer bottle he was currently working on and stumbled out. There was no thought or feeling in his movements. He wandered around listlessly, no destination in mind. He eventually found himself standing on some street corner, just out of the lamplight's reach. He stumbled into a wall and just slid down to the ground, barely feeling the rough brick scrape his skin through his shirt. He had no idea where he could possibly go from here. He had nothing left but a few credits and the beer he was working on. He could feel the alcohol and the exhaustion trying to drag him under, and right at that moment, he wanted nothing more than to let them succeed. He could just lie his head down on the sidewalk, give in to sleep, and go to a place where none of this was happening. Somewhere he could believe for just an instant that none of this was real. But before he could fully lose consciousness, Joanna came to the front of his mind again, causing him to claw his way back. She deserved better than this. She deserved more from him than using booze to forget or slipping off to the sanctuary of dreamland to pretend things weren't as bad as they actually were. She deserved to have her dad fight for her, to know what she meant to him, to never give up trying to be a positive presence in her life.

As these thoughts chased away the effects of the Iowa beer, he contemplated what he was getting into. It was going to be hard. He no longer had a job, and the drunken disorderly conduct that the jury had tagged on him would make it very difficult to get another. But he was damn sure going to try. His little girl was worth it. As he struggled his way back to his feet, he noticed a poster on a building, caught by the light from the streetlamp. It was a Starfleet recruiting ad. Starfleet. Space travel. Exposure to god only knew what on a big tin can in outer space. It was everything he'd always sworn he'd never do. But as he stared at the poster, the effects of the alcohol slowly wearing off, all he could think was 'what the hell.'

The next day found him on a shuttle with a batch of green cadets. He hadn't really thought about the fact that he'd have to fly from Iowa to California, and he was fighting off nausea just thinking about it. He tried to stay in the bathroom during the takeoff, but a bossy officer forced him out and into an empty seat next to some young guy, who was the only one other than him not in uniform. He looked like he too, was prone to a drunken incident here and there. He looked like he might actually be able to relate to Leonard in an out-of-luck sort of way. He tried to cover his nervousness for the impending flight by warning the man next to him that he might throw up at some point. The guy didn't really seem to know how respond to that. The ensuing banter led him to blurt out his situation to the guy – the kid, really. He of course, had nothing left now but his bones, and he said as much to the kid. As they introduced themselves, Leonard could only pray that this new beginning would work out for him.

**I remember watching that scene in the movie and wondering just what could have made it possible for McCoy's ex-wife to take everything from him, and this kind of happened. I'm not totally happy with how the end turned out, and I used more of the shuttle scene than I meant to, but it just ended up happening that way. By the way, anybody see Karl Urban in Red? I just saw it the other day and seeing him all secret agent was almost too much hotness to handle!**

**Please review if you liked this!**


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